


a brief social history of the omega separatist movement in samwell, mass., c. 1978

by familiar



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1970s, Bitty/Parse endgame, Lactation, M/M, Male Lactation, Mpreg, Nursing, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 04:03:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19455961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/familiar/pseuds/familiar
Summary: When Bitty left behind his life in Georgia to join an omega separatist commune, the last thing he expected was to fall for an alpha who was barging in where he didn't belong.





	a brief social history of the omega separatist movement in samwell, mass., c. 1978

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ravenreyamidala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenreyamidala/gifts).



> This was written for the 2019 Kent Parson Birthday Bash! The request came from [ravenreyamidala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenreyamidala/pseuds/ravenreyamidala), who asked for "mpreg, in the traditional sense (not eggpreg, as much as those are great), male lactation (kinks), fisting, dp, a whole lot" -- I think I got most of that? Happy 4th, and happy birthday to the only good character in any work of fiction, who was too good for the narrative and therefore subsequently written out of said work. HAPPY DAY O GLORIOUS HOCKEY KING.
> 
> ENORMOUS thanks for [tomato_greens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/) for a very last-minute and also hugely needed beta, and especially for the encouragement along the way.

**I.**

The morning Sherbrooke is supposed to play le Titan, Jack wakes nauseated, his center of gravity off, his attention wandering. It’s all he can do to keep down six eggs and the pink ham that overhangs the rim of the plate. It’s so early that no one else is up yet, and Jack only wishes he weren’t up, either. Madame has left out the sandwich bread, strawberry preserves, and a jar of the peanut butter Jack’s mother brings back from Upstate New York. It’s barely light out, and so cold that the peanut butter barely budges across the white bread. The smell is so intense, though, that Jack can barely stand it. If anything, it makes him more nauseous, and less able to concentrate. Today of all days, peanut butter makes him miss his mother terribly.

Not a complainer, Jack barely registers his body’s vulnerability; to notice weakness would be to grapple with it, to be susceptible. Jack has skated off concussions, taken shots through blood streaking across his line of sight. He’s spent weeks with odd-angle gaps in his front teeth and had false teeth screwed into his jaw. He’s had to swallow back insults after another boy’s gloves came off and while he was walloping Jack in the face called Jack all sorts of things, only some of which were true, and none of which were meant to be friendly. But this is unremarkable. All hockey players do this.

Hockey players do not, and this is fact, realize partway through the drive to school their seats are sopping wet.

Suddenly the song on the radio is making Jack want to cry. It’s Parse’s music, since he’s lately become very comfortable reaching over to change the station from the passenger seat of Jack’s truck. Jack doesn’t know it; he likes folk and some big band, mostly songs that sound old. But Parse likes his chanteuses, Streisand, and girl groups. Jack doesn’t understand it, or why he wants to cry.

“I have to pull over,” he says, and he parks the car on the side of the road and shuts off the radio: no more wailing, which is fine.

“We’re gonna be late, Zimms.”

Jack gets like this sometimes, his thoughts all a rush inside his head; there is plenty of valium in his hockey bag, but that won’t help with this. This is different.

This is terrifying.

“Kenny.” Jack forces it out: “Something’s very wrong.”

Kent is shorter, which he chalks up to presenting sooner; “late presenters get to keep growing,” he’s noted on many occasions. He has to scoot over to get close enough to Jack to pat his thigh. They haven’t kissed yet, but Jack has wanted to, even before this he wanted to. He realizes why now, and that he just didn’t know it yet.

Regardless, the inside of the truck smells now like something Jack really wants to eat.

“Let me help,” Kent whispers, and he moves in.

* * *

**II.**

Atlanta to Boston is on special for some reason. Dicky has already made his way into the city via thumb, and for all his worries the worst he got from the driver, bless her heart, was a lecture about hitchhiking: “It’s not safe, especially not for a little thing like you. If I hadn’t picked you up, who knows what would have happened?”

Dicky knows what would have happened, is the problem. His father would have given him a ride. Would have driven him the whole way. But that wasn’t going to work. At least he’s been saving his money from working part-time at a no-name bakery, sharing a shotgun shack in the Highlands with other omegas all four years at GSU. He didn’t make it one year back home, and now he’s off again. Dicky’s only been away from Georgia once, when he went to Chicago in 1968 to see the Ice Capades. He doesn’t remember much about Chicago, but it doesn’t matter anyway; the place he’s going is a little town outside of Boston, near a university. If there are omega colonies outside of Massachusetts, he hasn’t heard of them. Maybe they’re not looking for new people. He found this place, Samwell, because someone living there wrote a letter to the promega zine one of Dicky’s housemates passed him.

If there were promegas in Georgia, Dicky tells himself he would’ve stayed in Georgia. Doesn’t matter now, he supposes. He’s got a ticket in-hand. He puts it in his duffel and waits until the bus leaves at 9:50 p.m.

* * *

The first illusion that shatters when Dicky gets to Samwell is that the promega movement is for betas, too. None of the pamphlets he ever got passed under the table or across the porch ever mentioned this. It isn’t that he dislikes betas, it’s just, he never knew one. Now he knows several. Back in Georgia they seemed to gravitate toward the alphas, so that it became indistinguishable at times, who was what, if you weren’t close enough to get a whiff.

And yet, the actual first committed promega separatist Dicky meets is, in fact, a beta. He’s sitting on the ground at the entrance to the place, which beyond Dicky’s expectation is fenced in; a banner tied to the chain link reads SUPPORT THE ERA. Here’s this guy smoking a joint with a beat-up copy of _The Third Dynamic_ (which, to Bitty, seems awfully obvious, not that he finished reading it when someone gave him a contraband copy in college), who hops to his feet and tells Dicky, “I’m on gate duty.”

Also, he introduces himself as “Shitty.”

“It’s a nickname,” he explains, like that is sufficient. “Who’re you?”

“I’m Eric.” He clears his throat. “Eric Bittle, um, I wrote? They call me Dicky, though, if you wanna call me that and not ‘Eric,’ which no one really calls me.”

“What do they call you?”

“Dicky. It’s my middle name. Well, short for my middle name, which is my father’s name, but you can’t have two people in the same house going by the same thing, obviously. Down South—”

“Forget it,” Shitty tells him. “We’ll think of something else to call you.”

* * *

The first time Bitty lays eyes on the new guy, he’s still a virgin, despite his intentions in surrounding himself with other omegas, many of whom are his type: you have to be strong to raise your own walls, and strong of spirit to live with no phone, no daily mail, no hot water—no easy water at all, honestly, except the well water you gotta prime for. It’s annoying to pump before showering, washing, drinking. Some people tell Bitty his mashed potatoes taste better because he filled the pot with water he pumped himself.

“Gee, thanks,” has to suffice, because that’s nonsense and they all know it’s nonsense. Well water doesn’t taste great. At least he didn’t need some alpha to open an account with the public waterworks. At least it’s just a couple miles down to road by bicycle to use the payphone and check the P.O. Box in Samwell.

So lots of people around have been awful pretty, Bitty thinks—everyone’s got biceps, and it’s a pain in the ass to shave. Still, this new guy: he’s the kind of man Bitty likes, but taller, stronger, more tight-lipped.

Unfortunately, Bitty realizes there’s no equitable society when he’s told Jack is gonna take the mostly built cabin next door.

“Shouldn’t he start building his own place?” Bitty asks, practically hissing this to Shitty while they’re walking down the road to the post office. It’s May but the sky is heavy with gray clouds; it’s been raining, and the ground is damp on either side of the asphalt. Bitty’s almost lost his flip-flop in the muck at least twice. Something about it reminds him of Georgia, although in Georgia it’s already sticky and punishing with humidity, while up here it’s still a little early for cheeky soccer shorts. Still, it’s May, and May means skin to Bitty.

“Johnson left a perfectly good place,” Shitty says. “Shouldn’t someone live there? It would be kinda wasteful if a place just sat empty for longer than it had to.”

“But isn’t the point of the whole thing to be self-sufficient? To prove you can do things for yourself?”

“Withholding support because it’s not the kind of support you want to give feels very ungenerous. I thought the point was to put a stop to all that macho nonsense,” Shitty says. “You know, if you ask me.”

“Maybe I didn’t ask you,” Bitty says, well aware that he did not ask Shitty. Not even a little.

Still, it would be rather counterproductive for Bitty not to try a little politeness. He’s got to live across from the guy, after all. Maybe he’s a beta, too. Most of the people Bitty’s made friends with are, which is bizarre, and he’s beginning to feel bad about it. He’s still thinking about this when he realizes, I’ll bring him some muffins. That’ll break the ice, Bitty thinks, those are easy enough to concoct even on a hot day like today.

Walking up to Jack’s door, Bitty is shocked to see him outside, doing sets with a couple of hand weights.

Which means Jack is pretty sweaty, and—well, that’s an omega scent if Bitty’s ever caught one. He’s not on blockers, clearly. Maybe he moved here hoping to get laid, like Bitty did. Maybe I should go off blockers entirely, Bitty thinks to himself, because that could only help—but then I’d have heats, he reminds himself. And that was—he doesn’t want to do that again. Well, he’s stalled enough, so he’d better say something.

He manages to cough up an overly cheerly, “Hi, neighbor.”

“Hi.”

Bitty realizes now that it’s unusual that he got a whiff of this guy before ever hearing him speak. Well, now that he’s speaking, Bitty’s figured out this much: he’s not from any place in America Bitty’s ever been to.

“Where you from?”

“Canada,” Jack says, “originally.”

“Oh, wow.” Bitty was thinking something more exotic, based on the accent. “Well, hi, welcome to Samwell. I’m Eric Bittle, they call me Bitty.” He sticks his hand out, and Jack doesn’t take it. Beautiful people, Bitty thinks, are often the snobbiest. It’s really a shame. “Well, I’ve only been here shy of a year, so maybe I’m not the best person to welcome you, but I’m here anyway, since we’ll be living near each other. I’m from Georgia—”

“I can tell.”

“—as you can probably hear, and I got my BA at Georgia State, that’s in Atlanta, and I’m really happy to have you living near me because I like to cook, and I _love_ to bake, and sometimes I make group meals we eat down in the community hall but mostly my main job is milling and planting—I’m no good with electricity or plumbing or anything like that, although I figure we could help each other out? The guy who just vacated th

is place, Johnson, he went to go hike the Appalachian Trail, which seems like an odd thing to do but he said he had to for metaphysical reasons I wouldn’t ever understand. From what I gather you’re pretty quiet, so I bet you won’t say a lot of the kooky things he did, but I bring him up because I used to do some cooking and growing for him, and he used to help me out with some complicated electrical things. So if you’re into that just let me know what you like. Back home I mostly baked pies but I _will not_ milk a goat if my life depended on it, and I gather buying butter in town is pretty much looked down upon, so if you want me to make you one of those we’re gonna have to find some kinda fat to whip into pastry. Not literally whip, I mean. Anyway, uh, that’s who I am!” Feeling awkward, Bitty adds, “I also baked you some muffins.”

“Do you always talk this much?” Jack asks him.

“Mostly. What’d I come here for? Not to make myself shut up.”

“Maybe for quiet.” Jack pauses. “No screaming kids around.”

“There’s some,” Bitty says. “They’re easily avoided.”

“You like kids, Bittle?”

“I do.”

“A lot of promegas don’t.”

“Promegas don’t like being forced. We don’t like being told to do it—we don’t like that all people think we can do is that. But I don’t mind kids so much. A lot of promegas don’t. They’re innocent, you know?”

“Promegas are not innocent,” says Jack.

“I meant kids.”

Jack shrugs. “You’ve never had one, if that’s what you think.”

“How do you know I haven’t?” Bitty feels himself getting hot.

With some nerve, Jack sticks his hands out at the width of Bitty’s thighs. “You’ve never had one,” he repeats.

“Excuse _you_.”

Ignoring Bitty’s protests, Jack continues, “If you raised one in a place like this, it’d be different. No alphas around to screw things up, that’s fine. No television, no radio, no newspapers, no magazines, no ads, nothing but omegas around, a kid might grow up better. There’s no such thing as an innocent child, Bittle. They’re half-alpha. That’s the problem.”

“There’s betas here,” Bitty says, because he can’t think of what else to tell Jack about it.

Jack shrugs, again. “That’s fine.” He picks up his weights. “I think if you had a kid in a place like this, it’d be different.” Then he nudges his front door open with his knee, and goes inside. The muffins are still on the porch, in their tin, all twelve twinkling in the light from the demerara sprinkled across the tops.

He’ll surely come back and get these, Bitty presumes.

But the next morning, they’re still sitting on Jack’s front porch.

“Excuse me,” Bitty says, after banging on the door.

“Good morning to you too,” says Jack.

“I did not make these for fun.”

“Didn’t you?”

“You know where I got the flour for those muffins, honey? I had to mill it. You know who planted that wheat?”

Jack shakes his head.

“Well, I don’t, either, it was planted when I got here. But someone sowed it! Things don’t just grow in the ground for nothing.”

“Things do,” says Jack.

“Not cultivation,” Bitty explains. “I’m from Georgia. My grandmother grew watermelons out back and pickled the rinds. After you cook turnips, you drink the liquor.”

“The what?”

“The kinda broth that’s left over in the pot from the turnips and the ham hocks.”

Jack is frowning. “That doesn’t sound very good.”

“My point is you can’t just waste things.”

“I didn’t ask you to make me muffins.”

“I didn’t ask you to do bicep curls where I can see it but I’m not gonna stop you.”

Jack smiles, just slightly. “You’re pushy for an omega.”

“I’m just pushy.” Bitty picks up the plate of muffins and hands them to Jack. “They’ve got berries in there. You’ll like these.”

Instead of going home, Bitty marches immediately downhill so he can take a cold shower.

Of course, all his showers are cold, but he hasn’t fully realized how unremarkable that’s started to feel, until now.

* * *

“Good muffins,” Jack says, a few weeks later. “I just finished them.”

“Thanks.” Bitty pauses. “You _just_ finished them?”

“I put them in the freezer. I don’t eat a lot of desserts.”

“They’re barely sweet. I’d hardly call them desserts. You ever had a caramel cake?”

Jack shakes his head. “Where I’m from we have, uh, caramel tarts. Except it’s not exactly the same because the main source of the sweetness is maple syrup. There are maples on the property, I see. Does anyone know how to tap that?”

“I don’t think so. We’ve got beekeepers so we get a lot of honey. That’s what I put in the muffins—most things I make, really.”

“Well, harvest season’s really past now,” Jack explains. “But next year, I could do that, maybe. I went to maple farms when I was younger once or twice, so I could figure it, or send away for a book, I suppose.”

“Oh, gosh, would you? I just feel very limited here in my baking—I mean, it’s the dairy that’s the issue. I keep saying at meetings that we oughta get a cow, but then people tell me we gotta pasture it, and now I’m not the comptroller around here, that’s for the finance committee to figure out, but it seems like we could get regular cow milk without a lot of hassle, right? I mean goat milk makes a lot of decent things—yogurt, cheese, and so on. But I hate milking those damn things. They’re ugly as heck and their milk is just, blech.”

“I’ll milk you a goat.”

“Really, you don’t have to.”

“Someone’s got to do it,” Jack insists. “Why not me? I’m no good at domestic labor, Bittle, that’s why I’m on an omega separatist commune. I don’t mind.”

“Well, thanks,” is all Bitty can manage, because what else is he supposed to say? He doesn’t want to look a gift horse (or goat?) in the mouth. Of course, it feels less like a gift when Jack rouses Bitty at sunrise the next morning by pounding on his front door.

“Time to milk the goat,” Jack tells him. “Put on some clothes and meet me at the barn.”

“Why are you up so early?”

“I’m used to it. Are you not?”

“For your information, I was an awful good figure skater before I presented.” To prove his point, he does a brief plié.

“That’s ballet,” says Jack. “My mother did those, too.”

“It’s ice dancing,” Bitty tells him, “same difference—the Soviets can’t be stopped either way. Your mother is a ballerina?”

“No. I’ll see you at the barn.”

* * *

The same thing plays itself out all over again when it comes to churning butter.

“No, I don’t mind at all,” Jack promises. “Less time with the hand weights—this is all triceps.”

“Why do you care so much about lifting weights? Isn’t that just kind of like, looking how alphas want you to look?”

“It’s not a bad thing to be in shape.”

“I’m in shape,” Bitty argues. “You kinda have to be, in a place like this? It’s just, you got intent behind this.”

Jack stops churning. “I’m just used to doing it. Maybe someone told you I was a hockey player?”

Someone had mentioned it, at some point; it sounds almost exotic to Bitty, who is from a place where no one played hockey. “How long did you play?”

“Until I was 18.”

“Were you pretty good?”

“I could have been good enough for the NHL, probably—the majors. That’s what I was planning to do, and everyone seemed to think I could make it.”

“So why’d you stop?”

“Waylaid by biology,” Jack says without missing a beat. He’s obviously told this to people before. “What did you think you were going to do with your life before you ended up here?”

“Uh, you know, find an alpha, get married, have kids. I like kids, honestly. The worst part of the promega thing is the kids part—I know some people would do it with an alpha just to have a kid, but I don’t want to do that, and to be honest having the kid seems like a drag. I guess I started thinking maybe something was wrong with me when I would think about finding a mate and having a baby and I was just unexcited by the prospect, a little horrified? That was in high school. I’d like to have a kid in theory but the things you have to do to get to that—let some alpha bite you? Just the whole concept of knotting? I just started thinking, well, I don’t think I can ever do any of that, and I suppose that means I’m broken.”

“You’re not broken,” Jack says quietly. He looks into Bitty’s eyes.

“Well, you don’t want those things either, obviously, or else why would you be here?”

It takes a moment for Jack to respond, and when he does it’s very soft. He leans into Bitty. “Because I have all those things.”

For once, Bitty’s not sure what to say.

“He’s a hockey player, too,” Jack says. “My husband, I mean, not my kid.”

“How?”

“Well, he was my teammate when I—we were close around the time that I needed to do something about my heats. I didn’t want to stop playing hockey, and if I couldn’t get them under control I would have had to, so we just started mating.”

“So you stopped playing hockey because you had a kid?”

“No, I stopped playing because I overdosed on valium.”

“Honey, that’s awful.”

“Yes,” Jack agrees. “He wound up on a team, I wound up there, too, and eventually he wanted a baby and I figured I’d better do it, that’s what I’m good for.”

“So how’d you end up here?”

“I saw a flyer at the pediatrician’s office for a promega group, and started going.”

“I found out from someone on the omega roommates exchange at Georgia State.”

“I wish I’d gone to college.”

“You could,” Bitty says, “I mean, there’s a school up the road, they seem pretty decent.”

“Yes, my mother went there.”

“Gosh, did she?”

“Yes, in the 30s. She was in one of the first classes of coeds.”

“Really?”

“Yes. She’s a beta, she gets away with a lot.”

“Betas aren’t so bad. I can’t believe she graduated from Samwell! That’s so interesting. My mother wouldn’t have thought twice about going to college if my daddy hadn’t been recruited for the football team, you know. Of course, omegas couldn’t graduate from UGA at the time—but she took classes for a couple of years, and then went back while he was in Korea—”

“My mother didn’t graduate. She left to do plays—I suppose it doesn’t matter.” Jack pauses. “I don’t know about betas.”

“What don’t you know?”

“Well, how can they not be one thing or another?”

“Why don’t you ask your mother?”

“Because she’d lecture me for leaving Kent,” Jack says. Then he adds: “And the baby.”

“Do you miss them?”

“Who, Kent and the baby? I don’t miss him—he’s an alpha. Parts of it. Well. I guess nothing is one-sided.” Jack shrugs. “Maybe he feels the same. But he’s an alpha. You know how they are. What’s to miss?”

“What about the baby?”

Jack rolls his eyes, goes back to the butter churn.

Kent, Bitty thinks. That must be his name. Something flares in him, a spike of jealousy. I’m more gone on Jack than I must have thought, he realizes. And what a shame—he’s not interested in other omegas, clearly.

“Keep churning,” Bitty says, realizing it’s too quiet. He pats Jack on the shoulder. He sighs and tries to think about something else.

* * *

On a day like any other—because all days are the same—Bitty is in his kitchen, chopping mint to put in a fruit salad, when he hears some commotion down the road. When he thinks of this morning in later years, the thing he most recalls isn’t the drama outside the screen door or the overcast sky but the piercing smell of spearmint he grew himself in a container in his kitchen from seedlings before transplanting them into his plot in the community garden. He knows some of the kids have been using his herbs, and he tries not to be too petty about it; after all, Dex fixed his boiler, and helped him swap out his bulbs for an old chandelier in the bedroom, and rewired his kitchen sockets so the mixer wouldn’t short everyone out anymore; and also, Bitty hasn’t milked a goat for weeks. So he can spare a little mint, since it basically grows like a weed, and maybe he’s feeling a little charitable already when he steps onto his porch to ask what’s going on.

“There’s a guy here,” Chris tells him. “An alpha.”

“Well, you’re not gonna let him in, honey, are you?”

“ _I’m_ not. But he’s—he’s looking for Jack.”

“Gosh, is he?” Bitty shamefully thinks to himself that as much as he feels bad for Jack, he’s awful curious himself to get a look at this Kent.

“Yeah, he drove up in a fancy-looking car with a toddler.”

“Lord, that’s a lot. Has Jack seen him?”

“No, I think Shitty’s going to tell him what’s going on.”

What is going on? Bitty wonders. It’s against everything Bitty believes to put too much weight on one alpha showing his face outside their little compound. Isn’t the point not to notice them, not to care? It’s just like an alpha to cause this kind of scene. We should be bigger than this, Bitty thinks to himself. I don’t want him to think for one second that his being here matters, or not.

And yet, he’s curious: What kind of man would Jack mate with? It’s self-torture, Bitty realizes, to even wonder. But, still.

“That’s a good idea, sweetheart,” Bitty says. “You go tell Jack. I’m going to go talk to this guy.”

“Talk to him?” Chris asks.

“Yeah, you know, tell him to shoo.”

“Right, okay. Good plan!”

Bitty waits until Chris, bless his heart, is out of sight. Then he hustles down to the main gate.

* * *

Kent isn’t anything like what Bitty was expecting; he’s not bad-looking. He doesn’t seem, overtly, like an alpha. It could be that he’s holding a baby—well, a toddler, really, with ashy hair that sticks up awkwardly, a sullen look on his face.

“Hi,” Bitty says, waving, trying to seem friendly. “Awful bold of you to come down here.”

He raises an eyebrow, adjusts his hold on the child. “Just playing my role,” Kent says.

That’s weird, Bitty thinks—he would have expected something personal, evocative. “I don’t think that’s enough to get you in here.”

“I don’t want to get in there,” Kent says. “I want Jack to come out.”

“Jack’s not coming out.”

Bitty gets a look at the kid as Kent covers his ear, because the gesture makes the baby turn and peer at Bitty for the first time. He’s a sallow boy with striking eyes, deep-set like Jack’s, but the color—Bitty can’t make out that color. Maybe he’s standing too far away; Bitty comes closer, until he’s near enough to grasp one of the bars.

“That’s a pretty boy,” Bitty says, regretting that he sounds like he’s talking to a parrot. “How old are you, sweetpea?”

There’s quiet for a moment, until Kent says, “He’s almost 2.” There’s a beat. “He doesn’t talk.”

“Shouldn’t he be talking?”

“Shouldn’t Jack come out here and talk to me? You think it’s in the natural order of things for an omega to leave his kid?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Just, things don’t always happen how they’re supposed to, I guess. Kids need their Os, right? I talked to a shrink, and she thinks he’s traumatized. You think that’s right?”

“Do _you_?”

Kent sighs. “I think he’s like Jack.” When Bitty doesn’t say anything, he adds, “You know, not right.”

“I’ve known Jack for six weeks and he seems perfectly right to me.”

“Well, no offense, pal, but you don’t know him.”

“I think I got a pretty good read.”

“After six weeks?” The kid buries his face in Kent’s shoulder, and Kent moves his hand from the boy’s ear into his hair. “Jack and me were mates when we were 15 years old. He’s got scars in the shape of my teeth in his big ass. You ever mated with anyone?”

Not for the first time, shaking his head, Bitty’s glad he hasn’t.

“Yeah, so maybe don’t presume. You wanna know what it’s like, having a place inside you only one person can fill? I’m all for omega rights; put one in the White House for all I care. But I get up every day and look into Jack’s eyes, and he’s not there, and it’s killing me. “

An alpha with a flair for drama, Bitty thinks, studying Kent’s face: nice jaw, serious expression, clean-cut except for his sideburns, and he looks like he’s been in the sun, not recently or occasionally but daily, for many years.

“Where’d you drive up from?” Bitty asks. The convertible is visible off in the distance, shining in the afternoon light. Bitty’s only ever driven his father’s pick-up, but he can imagine what a car like Kent Parson’s drives like: folding cake flour into egg whites, running a hand over sulk, like barely moving. Like two omegas making love, Bitty supposes: gentle and slow, so slow, but stable and continuous, the urgency of a heat dissolved in the fluidity of two bodies timed to drown each other without interruption, without cessation. The first time Bitty fell for another omega he ran all four miles down a dirt road, his shins ruddy with iron-rich dust, streaked with sweat where it ran down from his thighs in late-June misery, and all the way into the church on the outskirts of town, where he knew no one and no one knew his mother and father. When he started running he thought he was going to ask at the altar to fix him—but by the time he got there his lungs felt like acid and he collapsed in the foyer, dehydrated.

He gets that same, horrible feeling when he looks at Jack now: no breath, light-headed; plus he’s always dusty, but they all are—no paved roads here at Samwell, not yet.

Kent interrupts him, says “Vegas,” and the baby starts to yowl, finally.

“That’s a long way.”

“Just a bit.” Kent shoves his hands in the kid’s mouth. “So you wanna go get Jack, please?”

“I’ll go tell him but he’s not gonna come, I don’t think.”

“Tell him I brought his son and my knot, and he can have both if he wants but I’m not leaving without seeing my O.”

Veiled threats with nothing to back them up, Bitty thinks, as he trudges up the hill. Alphas sure do make a lot of those.

* * *

Bitty knows from the moment he marches back uphill that Jack is not coming. He may as well cut out the drama and just stand out of sight for five minutes before marching back down and telling that Kent what he can go do with himself _and_ his baby. It’s like an alpha to bring a baby somewhere to try to ply an omega with it. Cute kid, though. Before Bitty’s done thinking through how confounding this all is and how irate he feels, he’s knocking on Jack’s door.

It swings open and Bitty says, “I’m sorry I don’t have any muffins.”

“Don’t be.” Jack opens the door wider. He’s barefoot, his shirt unbuttoned, and Bitty is loathe to admit that all he can think when he sees Jack’s bare chest is that he’d probably look good with a baby on him. Bitty’s spent so long thinking scandalous thoughts about other omegas that wanting to press his lips against Jack’s pink skin doesn’t phase him anymore.

But thinking about another omega with a baby—cut this out, Bitty tells himself. This is serious.

“You know I don’t want to judge you,” Bitty begins.

Jack cuts him off: “But you’re here to judge me.”

“Honey, maybe you if went down there, broke it to him softly—”

“No.” Jack is rummaging through his things, picking through piles of shirts and jockstraps and what Bitty assumes are hockey jerseys. “I’m not interested in that.”

“He came all this way, though.”

Whatever Jack is looking for, he finds it, because he stops digging through stacks of folded shirts and stands up, clutching whatever it is that he’s found. “Yes, that’s just it, an alpha does something and we’re all supposed to care. I don’t care.”

“Jack, you have a child together.”

“We have a history,” Jack agrees. “But that’s over now.”

“It’s a little more than a history if you got a kid together, though, right?”

“That’s a physical function of mating.”

“That really is pretty callous.”

“You know what? You go have a kid, then come back and tell me how you feel about it. I promise not to make you feel too guilty if I don’t think it’s how you ought to feel.”

“But a baby’s not to blame for whatever its daddy did.”

“If I go down there I don’t like what’s going to happen,” Jack says.

And Bitty wonders, what’s going to happen? Would Jack hit him? He hasn’t seen them together, but Jack seems like he could take Kent pretty easily. Get upset, more like.

“He can’t just come here.” Now Bitty sees what Jack was looking for: a pill bottle. “I told him I was leaving. I’m done.”

“Honey, what are those?”

Jack looks at the bottle he’s holding. “These? Valium.”

“Didn’t you say—”

“Yes,” says Jack. “Just, it’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.”

* * *

“He is definitely not coming.”

Kent has sat on the ground in Bitty’s absence, but he gets up before he replies. There’s grass stuck to his jeans and the pits of his polo are darkened. He leaves the baby sitting with a cup of something, and Bitty sees that Kent has spread out a jacket for the kid to sit on.

“Thanks for trying.”

“It’s not a problem,” Bitty says, before wanting to kick himself, because, well, wasn’t it something of a problem?

“Tell him this. I’m not here to make him do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

“Seems untrue.”

Kent sighs, and Bitty realizes that the baby is clinging to his leg. “What’s your name?”

Bitty points down. “What’s _his_ name?”

“Richard,” Kent answers at last, and before Bitty can consider how awkward it sounds, Kent adds: “It’s spelled like ‘Richard’ but it’s pronounced like French. Jack picked it out. I call him Ricky but, you know, Jack hates that. He thinks it’s being insensitive, I guess. But he just says everything I say is insensitive. Sometimes I think he just wants me not to say anything.”

“Well, I think that’s a sweet name,” says Bitty, trying to be kind. “My middle’s name Richard, after my daddy, and he goes by Rick, or at least that’s what my mother calls him—well, we call him ‘Coach’ a lot of the time because he coaches football—”

“Yes,” says Kent. “And what’s your name?”

“They call me ‘Bitty’ here, because—I guess it doesn’t matter why because.”

“Ricky’s named after a hockey player. Aren’t you?” The boy looks up at Kent but doesn’t say anything. “One of Jack’s dad’s friends. He took one look at this kid and said, ‘magnifique.’ I lived in Quebec for three years and that man still makes no sense to me.”

“The dad’s friend?” Bitty asks.

“No,” says Kent. “My father-in-law. The dad. Boy, I bet he’d be thrilled to come down here and drag Jack’s fat ass out of there.”

“Well, no thank you, sir.”

“I’m not, obviously,” Kent says. “The last thing I need is that man berating me for whatever it is I did to cause this.”

“So you’re here because you don’t want Jack’s father to yell at you?”

“What? No! I’m here because I love him. I love him, Bitty. Are you gonna help me?”

“I don’t know why I should help you,” Bitty says. “Jack’s not a dog you can chain up in a yard, honey. Omegas don’t belong to you. I’m sorry he did this, I am, I don’t think it’s right of him to leave a baby, but you gotta let us follow our hearts.”

“What about my heart?” Kent asks. When Bitty doesn’t reply, he adds, “Just admit you don’t know.”

“Well, how did you find us?”

Kent pulls something out of his pocket, and sticks it through the fence. “He left a note.”

 _Dear Kenny_ , it begins. _By the time you read this I will be on a plane to Massachusetts. Recent developments have caused me to realize I do not want_ —

Bitty skims it, admiring that Jack’s prose is clean, clipped, and straightforward. He stops when Kent ducks down to pick up the baby.

“He told me where he was going because he wanted me to come after him, obviously.”

“I don’t know,” says Bitty, handing the note back. “I mean, I admit it’s a bit confusing, to start out with ‘I’m leaving you’ and then add where you’re going, but that could be for any reason.”

“Not really. I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m here already.” H pauses. “There’s a motel in town. I’m going to get a room. And something to eat, I guess.”

“You haven’t eaten?”

“Not since this morning,” Kent says. “We stopped at a diner.”

“What’d you get?”

Kent stares at him for a moment before he answers, “Pancakes.”

“Something about me is, I make great pancakes?”

Another odd look. “Do you?”

“Yes, but, I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

“No,” Kent agrees. “It doesn’t.”

He begins to gather up his jacket, and Bitty notices that Kent can squat with the baby in his arms and it doesn’t even throw him.

Why aren’t I walking away yet? Bitty wonders.

When Kent gets up, he turns to Bitty and says, “Thank you.”

“For what? I didn’t get Jack to come out.”

“Oh, he’ll come out,” Kent says. “I just meant, for talking to me. For giving me a chance. Feel free to, you know. Come visit. I need to figure out what’s next?”

“A shower, maybe.”

“Maybe. Or find out a place in town that sells diapers. Or something to eat.”

“Or something to eat,” Bitty repeats. He isn’t sure why he lingers at the fence until Kent is behind the wheel and driving away.

* * *

The first batch of butter Jack churned has firmed up in the fridge to the point where Bitty thinks he can work it into a pie. He didn’t bring up measuring cups because the honest truth is that he can eyeball, yes, but also, he knows the ratio of flour to fat when he’s fleecing butter (or lard, he misses lard) into peas by the feel of it on his hands. His grandmother taught him to blend pastry before he was in preschool. She probably knew he’d be an omega, bless her heart.

Well, you’re making a pie for an alpha, he thinks to himself. Then: it doesn’t mean anything, really; this is what he _does_ , it’s mere politeness.

Still, he chides, why should you make anything for an alpha, any alpha? He can make his own pie if he wants it. I don’t owe him pie, I don’t owe him emotional support, and I definitely don’t owe him any childcare. If he tries to rope me into childcare, I’m leaving. I’d rather pine pointlessly after Jack forever than change someone else’s child’s diaper.

While the dough is chilling, Bitty talks a long walk around the compound. He needs something _for_ the pie, is the problem. He doesn’t have corn syrup, honey, molasses, or lemon. He’s got dairy and eggs, but custard won’t do; he’s going to have to walk up the road with this in July heat. So he wanders until he’s got enough wild berries to make into a pie. He’ll make a pretty lattice crust with wide enough gaps for the juice to burn off, too. He doesn’t have any cornstarch, he realizes. He tosses his harvest in flour and sugar before dumping it into shell.

He puts the leftover raspberries in the fridge, and thinks about what’s gone wrong in his life that this is what he’s doing with his down time.

* * *

“Hello,” Bitty says brightly, when Kent opens the door. “Surprise.”

“That’s a pie.”

“You said you were hungry?”

“That was yesterday,” Kent says, but he swings the door open anyhow.

Bitty can see the baby is asleep on one of the beds. “You want to smoke?”

Kent shrugs. “Sure, I could.”

“They say I’m good at this.” He wriggles his fingers. “Small hands. I roll pretty tightly.”

“They tell me I have soft hands, sometimes,” Kent says quietly. “Meaning I’m—careful, kind of. Some hockey players are just strong, and I guess I’m strong, but it’s a euphemism they use when they don’t want to call a guy too small or too femmey or whatever. They say you’ve got good hands, soft hands. I guess I handle a stick well. I have good control, I guess.”

Bitty waits for him to make the obvious jokes; it’s surprising that Kent doesn’t. He seemed mouthy, before. But now he’s just quiet.

“I never smoke,” he says, nervously taking a drag.

“Are you good, at hockey?” Bitty asks.

“Am I any good? I’m pretty okay.” The joint is loose between his fingers. Bitty notices him staring at it, worries it might fall from his grasp. But it doesn’t; Kent says, “here,” and hands it to Bitty.

He takes it, takes a drag from it. Bitty thinks, briefly, that this is what an alpha tastes like—and then he corrects himself and thinks, _this is what Kent Parson tastes like in my mouth_. Like wet rolling papers, essentially, but Bitty noticed. And he doesn’t usually notice.

“Thanks for the hit,” Kent says, getting up. His shorts barely cover anything, Bitty notices. He has a lot of thigh.

I must not look at anything else, Bitty tells himself. This is someone else’s alpha—and then he realizes, oh my lord, I am looking at an alpha.

“Any time.” Bitty swallows, pulling down the hem of his shirt and brushing the warm ash from his thigh. It leaves a gray smudge. How many months, he wonders, will it be until he can take a real shower?

* * *

The next morning, Bitty knocks on Jack’s door.

“I’m going to make griddle cakes,” Bitty says. “With wild raspberries. Do you want some? Wake up.”

Jack opens the door with his hair a mess, and a shirt he only hastily threw on. “And butter?”

“Butter, obviously,” Bitty says. “You can’t have pancakes without butter.”

“I thought they were griddle cakes.”

“I suppose it depends on whether you cook em in a pan or on a griddle.”

“And which are we using?”

“A skillet, of course.” Bitty pulls it down from the shelf, puts it on the cooktop, starts making a mental list—sugar the raspberries, first, to start with. He gets his jar of sugar off the shelf, too.

“Aren’t they skillet cakes?” Jack asks. “I mean, if you make the cakes in a skillet?”

“No one talks about skillet cakes,” Bitty says. “It’s just semantics.”

“I’ll eat it either way. What can I do to help?”

“Nothing, nothing. You just sit.”

“I hate just sitting.”

“Just sit,” Bitty repeats. He pats Jack on the shoulders with both of his hands. “There you go.”

While Bitty cranks up the cooktop and starts mixing dry ingredients, they talk idly about Samwell life: who’s weeding cucumbers this week, who’s helping to run the power lines across the northern boundary, who’s building a gazebo, which Jack calls frivolous.

“I think it’s nice to have some nice things,” Bitty tells him.

“Nice, sure, but who’s got time for nice?”

“What’s the point of living if you don’t have nice things in your life?” Now that three pancakes are done, Bitty stacks them on a plate and smears butter on top, then sets the whole thing in front of Jack. “You promised me you’d figure out the syrup, remember?”

“That has to wait until next March.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.” Bitty sits with his own plate. He isn’t sure how to broach what’s really on his mind, so he just blurts out, “Is Kent good? I mean, at hockey.”

Jack’s eyes narrow. “Why?”

“Well, he said he was pretty okay.”

“Pretty okay?” Jack’s voice starts to pitch up. “He took a bottom-ranked nothing team where they shouldn’t even have hockey and got them to a Stanley Cup in two years after becoming their captain. Is that any good?” Bitty shrugs, so Jack says, “It means he’s one of the best.”

“And you can’t forgive him for it?”

“I was better,” Jack says. “But look at me, Bittle, I can’t do anything _like this_.”

“Look, I know it probably feels that way. But Jack, honey, that’s no way to think. There’s gonna be a first omega hockey star one day, right? There’s gonna be a first omega everything. But not if you keep yourself from doing it, you know?”

“It’s easier said than done, Bittle.”

“But one day someone’s gonna do it—don’t you want it to be you? You could do it.”

“I can’t do anything but milk goats and churn butter,” says Jack. “I’m twenty-eight, I’m who knows how far from a pair of pair of skates, and I’m pregnant.”

“Are you really?”

Jack snorts. “Why do you think Kent came after me?”

“Do you want to be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? Yes, no. I wasn’t trying to.”

“Well, do you have to be? I don’t think anyone can help on this compound, but we can just go into Boston—”

“Nothing against that,” says Jack, “but the alternative’s not so bad.”

Bitty cannot believe that. “Isn’t it?”

Jack snorts. “I don’t know how to explain if you’ve never done it, but as much as you mentally don’t want something, it’s possible for your body to want it? Or need it, even?”

“No, I relate to that, because—well, because why doesn’t matter so much but, I think that’s very human, mentally regretting what you physically want.”

“Mating with someone makes you _need_ them, and everything that goes along with it—it floods you with thoughts and with feelings that can be nearly too much to bear. Do you get that?”

“Honestly,” says Bitty, “the idea kind of terrifies me. I’ve been on suppressants for—gosh, for ten years now.”

“Kent was just there when it started, and at the time I let him do it because I thought, well, maybe if I can make this a regular thing it’ll help me keep the heats under control. And obviously that didn’t work out, but I’ve never been on suppressants. I don’t mind the heats, honestly—I just thought I could control them if I had someone to mate with, I guess. I was very young and very stupid.”

“But, still, why didn’t you just go on suppressants?”

“Quebec is very Catholic. There were no heat suppressants, and even if there were, then what? It’s medically known I’m an omega. I wanted to keep playing. I got to keep playing. I maybe played less time than I could have, but more than I should have. How much else was I supposed to do?”

“I just don’t think giving up is in your nature.”

“Giving up is in my nature,” Jack says darkly. “I’m an omega, Bittle.”

“Well, look,” says Bitty. “I don’t believe that’s true, but if it is, shouldn’t you at least confront Kent and tell him you can’t stay with him?”

“I’m afraid of what’s going to happen if I do. I mean, him and me, we’ve had our differences, but.”

“But?”

Jack sighs. “All right, fine. Fine.”

Oh, lord, Bitty thinks, stumbling out of doors and into the summer heat. It certainly feels like the pay phone is a very far walk. He only hopes Kent is willing to accept the charges.

* * *

Jack insists Kent not bring the baby when they meet, and it takes Kent a few days to find a sitter. “He’s Jack’s baby,” Kent complains, but he does what he has to.

They plan to meet over lunch; Shitty enthuses about how they’re planning to make money from bottling and selling honey at local farmer’s markets.

Oh gosh, Bitty thinks, thank the lord I won’t be involved in any way with _that_.

It’s only once they’re shambling silently down the hill to meet Kent at the spot where they first spoke through the fence that Bitty begins to worry about what’s going to happen.

What happens is, without preamble, Jack begins scaling the fence.

And Kent shouts, “You shouldn’t be climbing over that.”

So Jack shouts down to him, “Don’t tell me what to do.”

“I’m just looking out for you.”

Jack hops down. “I don’t need you to look out for me.”

“What do you need from me?”

“Don’t.”

“Face it, Jack.”

“ _Don’t_.”

“Guys.” Bitty grasps the fence, ashamed of what he’s about to do. He shouldn’t be hearing this—but how can he just stand there and say nothing. He looks behind—no one’s there. It’s been so long since he was outside. He slips his foot in between the links.

“Bittle, don’t do that, I’m coming back as soon as Kent leaves.”

“I’m not leaving until you—”

“Until I what, until I agree to go back to Vegas with you?”

“I miss you,” Kent says.

“Of course you do.”

“Boys.” Bitty hops from the fence. His feet touch the dirt outside the compound—it’s the same dirt, he realizes, which feels like a pretty stupid thing not to have known before.

“I’ll tell Shitty to put up razor wire,” Jack says.

“That’s stupid, hon, that’ll only keep us in.”

“We’re free to leave out the front where everyone can see us.” Jack crosses his arms. “What do you want, Parse?”

Kent’s eyes soften. He doesn’t know, Bitty thinks. He doesn’t even know what he’s after.

“You can’t even tell me you want me,” Jack says. “It’s all instinct for you.”

“I’m sure it’s more complicated than that,” Bitty says.

“I don’t want to be with someone because they claimed me when I was 15,” Jack says. “What is that? That’s meaningless.”

“It’s not meaningless!” Kent shouts. “A part of me is missing—don’t you feel it?”

“I feel fine,” Jack insists. “I’ve never felt better.”

“Yeah, is that so?”

“Yes,” Jack breaths, and it’s only when Bitty sees him slip into Kent’s personal space that Bitty realizes, oh lord, this is not going to go how he thought it would. “I didn’t want to do this, or even see you. You can’t come in there.” He gestures behind.

“I’ve got a motel room,”

“The sitter can take Ricky.”

“Don’t call him that,” Jack says, but it’s not angry anymore. He sounds almost resigned.

“I’ve got the car,” Kent says, pulling the keys out.

“Bittle,” says Jack, turning around. “Are you coming?”

* * *

“Here’s 10 bucks,” Kent says, as he peels it off a wad of cash from his pocket. “The grown-ups need to talk.”

“Whatever you say,” the girl tells him, scooping up the kid.

Bitty watches Jack and Kent for their reactions as a teenage girl ambles away with their child. Kent’s poker face is sterling, his features impassive and genuinely tough to make out.

Jack, hands on his hips, looks a little sick until the girl takes the baby down the stairs and disappears from sight. All that’s left is the sound of her sandals on wet gravel.

“Well,” Kent says, slamming the door. He tugs the curtains shut.

“You coulda left him with someone at the compound,” Bitty says. Admittedly it only just occurred to him. Why didn’t he think of it sooner?

“This was easiest. There was a sheet on the board in the office. I ripped off her number.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Jack says, and Bitty notices that he sounds a bit out of it, or distracted—big pupils, hands on his thighs. “You got me here, Parse. Now what?”

The most alphalike thing Kent has done yet is climb on top of Jack, lay his hands on Jack’s jaw, and kiss him.

Bitty flinches, because he knows what must be coming next: for Jack to toss Kent off of him and get out.

Well, Bitty must be an idiot, because Jack does nothing of the sort. He leans into it, accepting whatever Kent’s got for him—tongue, yes; Kent’s hands sliding down to grope Jack through his shirt; and he says, against Jack’s lips, “You want my knot.”

Jack swallows those words like he’s dehydrated. He nods into it, into Kent’s mouth, drawing Kent’s hand down from his chest and over the length of Jack’s body, and between Jack’s legs, where Kent grasps what’s obviously an entire handful.

“You’re hard for me,” Kent says. “Is that all?”

“I’m wet,” Jack says, almost whispering, but even through his knotty accent Bitty can understand that because what else would an omega say? Bitty’s thought about it.

And, well, he’s still standing there, harder than he’s ever been before, maybe a little wet, and at a total loss for what to do. It would be rude to leave, right?

So he watches, and this is what he sees:

Obviously they’re both hard, grinding on each other, and they must have been doing this for a few minutes when Kent finally reaches behind to grasp at Jack’s ass. Bitty wonders if Jack’s always had a big ass, or if maybe it’s cause he had a baby. Suddenly Bitty remembers Jack saying something, the first time they met, about Bitty’s hips being narrow. Well, Bitty’s hips have always been narrow, and he’s always been fairly flat back there, to the point that at least a couple of people have jokingly asked him over the years, “Are you sure you’re an omega?” Of course he is, and it’s a stupid question; you don’t forget something like making a mess of yourself in eighth-grade Bible study, wanting to vomit as slick runs down your leg. There’s no end to the amount of porn about it, the “how many alphas would it take to fill you?” dialogue, the other things that make Bitty glad he’s never had a second heat.

But this thing he’s watching is almost sweet. Kent’s slipped his fingers into Jack’s shorts and it’s obvious that he’s working his fingers into Jack in time with their mouths. Their lips part only when Kent gasps something like “you’re so open for me” and Jack moans into it, or “you’re going to be so _big_.” The thing is, Bitty has seen Jack with his shirt off, and it isn’t obvious what Jack would look like when he’s more than a few months along. But he starts touching himself when he thinks about it. He can barely contain himself, boggling at how good they look together.

“Knot me,” Jack says, tugging his shorts off. “Do it, Kenny.”

“Do you think about it?”

“I think about it every day.”

“Me too,” Kent says, though all Bitty can really think about is how serious Jack is, and how frank, and how he hardly seems like someone who’s thinking about a big knot plugging his ass when he’s joylessly and silently spooning porridge into his mouth at group breakfast. People all over Samwell are fucking, is the thing—was Bitty hoping he’d wind up doing it with Jack? Maybe, a little.

This is second best, he guesses.

Clothes off, Jack and Kent do it missionary. There’s something sweet about that to Bitty, who’s unable to help himself from pulling his dick out.

“Hey,” Kent says, and Bitty thinks, oh gosh, I’ve broken some taboo, haven’t I? But, no: “Bitty, you should—don’t stand there, come here.”

Now here’s something about biology: For all of Bitty’s self-certainty, when an alpha barks out a command at him, he follows it.

“Get your clothes off,” Kent tells him. “Okay, that’s good. He’s cute, right?” Jack nods, his eyes shut tightly, so how would he know? But Kent is stroking their cocks together, and the motel bedspread is already darkening where Jack’s slick is seeping into the thin quilt.

For weeks, all Bitty’s been thinking about is being with Jack: their mouths pressed together, their hands on each other, their slick mingling together as they fumble into pleasure.

But when Bitty comes into another omega’s mouth for the first time, he’s staring into Kent’s eyes. What color are his eyes? Bitty wonders, right before he comes. I want to remember this forever, because when these guys go back to Vegas, that’s all I’ll have.

“I’m knotting him,” Kent says to Bitty.

“I’m coming,” Bitty sighs.

Jack is underneath them, his mouth full, saying nothing.

It feels more intimate, somehow, that way: like he and Kent are the ones sharing something, really. Like they’re totally alone.

* * *

Bitty wakes when there’s a knock at the door; he realizes, oh, yes, I’m in a hotel room. A motel room. It’s air-conditioned, at least. Next to him, someone’s stirring—it’s Jack.

“Bittle,” Jack says, sitting up shaking Bitty at the hip.

Kent is at the door, saying “thanks”; he shuts it with his thigh because he’s holding the baby.

And Jack says—well, Bitty’s not sure. Something in French, possibly.

“I don’t know,” Kent replies.

And then the baby says—he says something else Bitty doesn’t understand. Not much, poor kid, his eyes going wide as he reaches out for Jack.

“Okay,” Kent agrees, “okay,” and he hands the kid over to Jack, who—and Bitty cannot believe this—takes him swiftly to breast.

“Is that French?” Bitty asks, to staunch the possibility that either Kent or Jack will think he is embarrassed by this, although he is—it’s both off-putting and deeply erotic.

“Oui,” says Kent. “Jack wants him to speak it.”

“He does speak it,” Jack insists. “I do feel bad, depriving him of that.”

“Can we be done with this?” Kent asks, and it comes out a little desperate.

“I just started.”

“No, _can we go home?_ is what I mean. Jack, honestly, can we stop this insanity? We don’t even have to go to Vegas directly, we can go to Montreal and see your parents, and you know I hate that. We can go anywhere, but I don’t want to live with this uncertainty over my head anymore. It’s not fair.”

“What’s fair?” Jack asks. “Is being deprived of any right to choose what I do with my life fair?”

“I didn’t make you overdose on valium!”

“And I didn’t make you—I can’t make you do anything.”

“You can make me do anything you want if you agree to leave,” Kent says. “Jack. Please.”

“I’m not leaving,” Jack says, with an air of finality.

Kent chokes out something, a meager, “But—”

“This one’s yours”—even as Jack says it, there’s something disconnected and insincere about it, Bitty thinks; it goes against basic human feeling to ask to nurse a child you don’t consider yours. “This one’s mine.”

“Oh, it’s a him?” Bitty asks.

Jack shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters!” Kent shouts. It’s the first time Bitty’s really seen him raise his voice. When they first met, he seemed mean. Now he seems—what, vulnerable? Flawed? Either way, Bitty wants—oh, lord, he can barely admit it to himself.

“I need a smoke,” he announces, throwing the sheets off. He’s got a joint in his pocket—yes, his shorts are on the floor. For the first time in his life he thinks, well, thankfully I’m not a woman or I’d have to find my shirt. Lord knows what happened to that. The joint falls out while he’s tugging up the denim; he squats down, fetches it, stands up and sees, gosh, that baby must have been pretty hungry.

And then he notices Kent standing there, in his boxers, brows knit like he’s trying to stop himself from crying or something.

“Come on,” Bitty says, tugging him away by the waistband. “We’ll just sit on the stairs for a bit.”

Alphas, Bitty could never forget, don’t typically take kindly to commands.

“What?” Kent asks. “Ah, okay.” He does grab an undershirt which is a shame; it’s only after seeing Kent’s body in the raking light coming from the bathroom vanity that Bitty can appreciate his body, which is somehow lithe and muscled, not in the impossible way alphas look in Victorian paintings of Greek myths or the cheap black-and-white erotica booklets Bitty’s roommates used to pass along to him in college. He has abs, but for a moment Bitty feels like Kent would let Bitty touch them.

Well, what a stupid thing to think, Bitty reminds himself, we just—simultaneously buried ourselves at opposite ends of the same rigmarole.

“Well?” Jack asks. “Aren’t you going?”

Bitty says, “Yes, of course,” and grabs Kent’s hand to lead him out the door.

* * *

It’s sunset and from the second story of this motel Bitty can see blinding colors across the river that snakes through the campus and the town. It skirts the compound property and more than once Shitty has waxed rhapsodically about the beauty of hydroelectricity, and how they should all be building a dam together, or at least something on the river. Only now that he is getting high does Bitty realize, in a way that he understands to be ironic, that he would prefer not to be electrocuted to death while trying to rig an illegal dam to power their refrigerators.

“I’ve never done this before,” Kent says, waving the smoke away.

“A _menage_?” Bitty asks, raising his brows, trying to make it sound funny. He pronounces French badly—bad for Quebec; bad for anywhere, probably, though Bitty has never heard French spoken outside of North America, and only rarely at that, with subtitles at the Fox on rare occasions. That’s so far away, he thinks. The person who saw those movies was different. If that were his baby, he’d just talk to it in English.

“Well, yeah. But I mean—” Kent is hardly smoking the joint he’s lit; Bitty wishes he had a little dish to be an ashtray “—with someone who’s not Jack.”

“Jack was there,” Bitty says.

“I know, and that’s fine, but it’s not what I mean.”

“I’ve never done it at all before, if you’re curious.”

“I wasn’t curious.” Kent pauses. “Before.”

“What’s it to you who I’ve been with?”

“I’ve made a royal mess of this.”

“No,” says Bitty, these things are awful tough.

Kent puts the joint down and sighs. “What’s the point to being here? I’m living in a motel. My kid’s just getting confused, seeing Jack and then not seeing Jack. And I’m—well, he’s not coming back with me. It’s over with him, isn’t it? I should go back there. I have to go back eventually. At some point I have to admit that it’s over.”

“I agree that Jack is probably not going back with you.”

“We had a good thing.”

“At least, you look pretty good together.”

“Yeah,” Kent agrees, but he sounds sad. “That’s mostly him.”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t know.” Bitty might be blushing, the very thought of which is patently embarrassing. So, yes, now he’d definitely blushing. “Kent, you’re lovely. I can’t be saying this to an alpha, that’s absurd, but, you are.”

“What’s absurd about that?”

“Well, I live on an omega separatist compound, for one thing!”

“Some people would say _that’s_ absurd.”

“Do you think it’s absurd?”

Kent takes a moment to say, “No, I don’t. I wish places like this didn’t have to exist, or that Jack felt like he didn’t have to do this. I wish I could give him what he wants. But I guess it’s all right, in the end, that I came out here—you’ve really been patient with me, you know? Thanks. For listening, and just—I never thought I’d meet someone I wanted to be with who wasn’t Jack, but, I’m charmed.”

“Well, thank you.” Bitty notices that Kent is blushing, too.

“You like it here?” Kent asks, waving his hands around vaguely. “Living on the land or whatever.”

“I like the people!” Bitty says, but then he feels like he’d better just admit that, well, even if that’s true, “I don’t really like, uh, having to scavenge for berries to make pies. Or having to crank out well water. For that matter, I hate well water. You have to boil it before you can use it? And, honey, it’s summer.” He sighs. “I wish I could hack it without missing all the things I’ve had to give up, I guess. We’ve only got goats, which means we’ve only got goat milk, which means we’ve only got goat butter. And, well—you tried that pie.”

“It was pretty good,” Kent says.

“I could do better,” Bitty promises, “if I had _real_ butter. Jack churned it, you know. He didn’t do a bad job. But, gosh, it’s not the same, all uniform-like from the supermarket.”

“You could come with me,” Kent says.

“To where?”

“Back to Vegas.”

“I’m not saying no. But, Kent, I don’t want to mate with an alpha.”

“That’s very convenient, then, because I’m already—you know.”

“I’ve never had a heat and I won’t have one,” Bitty says. “Not since the first one. I’ll never have another one, you get me? I’m on suppressants, so, never.”

“That’s okay.”

“And I don’t want to have kids—I mean, I love kids, but the idea of _having_ one, like, physically—”

“That’s fine. I have a kid. Or two. I guess. Kind of.”

“And—I don’t want to knot? I’ve never done it before and it’s just ... it’s not for me, okay?”

“You’ve never done it?”

“I never want to do it,” Bitty presses. “Ever. You get me?”

“I do.”

“Do you? Because I worry that you don’t really know—I could see myself with you, honey, I could, but I worry that you don’t know what you’re getting, and that maybe it’s a rash decision because of Jack and, I guess, the baby.”

“I guess,” Kent admits. “I don’t know. I mean, I already had all of those things. And they didn’t make it work, you know. Look at this. Look at what we’re doing here. Look at what _I’m_ doing here. I had someone I could do those things with, and it led to all of this.”

“All right, well, look. I don’t really—can I sleep on it? I think we should both make sure this is what we want.”

“I’m gonna—do you think Jack’s ready to go home? I gotta—I need to talk to a few people.”

“I don’t know,” Kent says. “Let’s see.” He begins to stand up, but Bitty grasps him by the forearm.

“Thank you.” Bitty leans in, nearly whispering.

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“Yes, I know! That’s the point.” Very tentatively, he presses his lips to Kent’s.

* * *

**III.**

Regrets come to Kent like dreams, half-realized in his waking hours, slips of memories that weigh down on him until he’s left with the unease of knowing he regrets without knowing really why, or what. He shouldn’t have regrets, is the thing, the way that in a hockey game, it’s no use trying to correct plays you’ve already made because the game moves so fast it’s well beyond you if you take the time to worry. That’s what tape is for.

Still, much isn’t right about this: you can’t bring a promega around the clubhouse without raising a few hackles, for one thing. He left something important behind—two things probably, now, he figures.

Sometimes he thinks about the baby. It hurts to think about the baby and so Kent tries his best not to.

“Nobody gets everything they want,” Bitty says, one night when Kent has come back from the arena bruised, and aching, and with stitches but without any good reason to have gotten them. Kent has lost a lot of games in his career. For many years it didn’t bother him so much, because no one wins all of them.

But you win some games. Enough to make it to the post-season, anyway.

When Kent wakes up in the mornings with Bitty beside him, he knows that’s all he needs.


End file.
